“We’ve fully integrated Git support into Visual Studio,” a Microsoft representative told me. “From Visual Studio and within the Application Lifecycle Management tool, you’ll be able to access Git projects on any Git server.”

Microsoft announced the surprising news today at ALM Summit, the company’s application lifecycle management conference. Git is a wildly popular way to share projects, move code, collaborate with developers locally and globally, and roll back changes that don’t quite work out the way they were intended.

While millions of developers use Git — including two million on the popular GitHub alone — it hasn’t been quite as friendly a developer tool on Windows as on other platforms, Microsoft said. Git is “virtually synonymous”with distributed source control, Microsoft fellow Brian Harry acknowledged in his keynote this morning announcing the move, and Microsoft, which traditionally has centralized source control, has not had a similar type of distributed version control system.

Brian Harry, Microsoft Fellow

So in a classic if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em moment, the question that Microsoft asked itself was “Why don’t we just adopt Git?” Harry said.

The new integration is already enabled this morning in Team Foundation Server, Microsoft’s own source control software. And Visual Studio 2012 will soon be able to connect to any Git host, such as TFS, CodePlex, GitHub, and Stash, via a plugin.

One of the things that Microsoft has done over the past few months in preparation for this move is to contribute to the open source codebase. Today, a representative told me, Microsoft has “a number of full-time engineers actively working on and contributing to the lib2git project.”

Microsoft is not simply copying files over to its one source management services, Harry said, although syncing is available. Rather, the integration is native.

“Our hosting of Git is not Microsoft hosting of Git … it’s Git,” Harry added. “This is a fully functioning and compatible Git client.”

While this may be a surprising, even shocking development, it’s been in the making for quite some time, Harry posted on his MSDN blog:

We started talking about having DVCS support for TFS a year or more ago.  I even mentioned at the end of this post over a year ago that DVCS was in our future.  After a few months of investigation (in the middle of working on TFS 2012), we concluded that adding Git support was the right approach.  As I write this, I’m wondering what the reaction among our customers will be but I can say the reaction inside my own team when we first proposed this was quite mixed.  There were certainly plenty of people who wanted to “build a better DVCS system” or integrate DVCS workflows into the existing implementation.  There were others who were concerned about open source and lack of “control” issues.  But, the more we looked at it, the more it looked like the right thing to do.

photo credit: shehan365 via photopin cc

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

For a limited time, Atlassian is making SourceTree free for all in an attempt to attract more users. The app can be downloaded from the Mac App Store and via direct download from the SourceTree website.

Steve Streeting, the original SourceTree developer, is now working for Atlassian and will continue working on his app. In the future, SourceTree will get more resources from Atlassian to allow for more customer support and product integration.

“SourceTree has won over the hearts and minds of its customer base by building a brilliantly engineered app,” Atlassian chief executive and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes said in a release. “[It] provides serious relief to the headache of managing multiple repositories, letting you manage and interface with multiple Git and Hg repositories visually through a client instead of the command line.”

In the same release, Streeting stated, “Atlassian was the perfect place for SourceTree to set down new roots. I’m looking rolling up my sleeves and taking SourceTree to new heights.”

Atlassian also announced that Bitbucket now supports Git.

Over the past year, Atlassian said the number of Bitbucket accounts has tripled. In adding Git support, Atlassian hopes to bring even more users into the fold by offering customers the ability to use both Git and Mercurial repositories in a single code hosting service without limiting the number of repositories (both private and public) each user can create.

The company is offering unlimited private and Git repositories for teams of five developers free of charge.

Cannon-Brookes told VentureBeat that while he sees Bitbucket and its most popular competitor, Github, as having slightly different foci (Github skews toward open-source projects and public code repositories, while he says Bitbucket is more focused on private repositories for teams), he admits there’s a fair amount of overlap between the two.

“We believe Bitbucket offers more choice and greater flexibility for its users: support for both Mercurial and now Git, and unlimited private repositories,” he said. “Developers don’t get penalized by forking and sharing code privately. Bitbucket is priced based on the number of collaborators, not the amount of work those collaborates do.

“SourceTree similarly is about developer choice and flexibility. SourceTree supports Mercurial, Git, and Subversion. And you can connect SourceTree to a variety of code hosting services, including Bitbucket and Github.”

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---